Eva Lake: Anonymous Women, 2011 - 2016
Anonymous Women
Statement
In another body
of work, Targets, I dealt with famous women
and their shared, known narrative. In time I came to realize that I also had an
emotional investment with the unnamed glamour girl, models and the like,
beauties I've studied since childhood. Their looks were their only story,
voiceless and anonymous. But those beautiful women did carry all kinds of
identity to me - they became vehicles for tales I wished to tell.
Around the same time I began the Anonymous Women, I recommenced work as a makeup
artist after a fifteen year hiatus. The
return to a makeup career, such as it was, freed up and reshuffled my idea of
the anonymous beauty. I had also a heightened idea of the face as cut up body
parts, well aware that women’s faces are sliced and diced all the time.
I recall a fellow artist once telling me that beauty was dangerous. I knew this
to be the truth in painting, but I also felt it was the case in many other
things, including women. What I want to do with beauty and glorious artifice is
put her where you least expect her to be. She's often shoved into a box and I
want to bust her out. She’s the ocean, the sky, the forest. She’s the
skyscraper, the Pantheon,
the illuminated manuscript. She's also the wall, the decor, the carpet you step
on. A girl from Southern Oregon, gazing down a muddy dirt road. She's the mover
in art history and the genius of the crime.
Eva Lake
2016
On The Women: